Trauma and Dissociation in Drive My Car

Drive My Car (Hamaguchi 2021) is an award-winning Japanese film about trauma and loss. The screenplay for the film was co-written by Takamasa Oe and the film's director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and was adapted from three short stories by Haruki Murakami (2017)1 in a collection called Men Without Women. Almost all the characters in this film are “haunted,”2 that is to say, they are compromised by a past we do not know, and they do not acknowledge. An element of trauma, largely unrecognized and unnamed, suffuses the film. The characters move through their lives reenacting their past hurts, often without awareness of what they are repeating or why.

Viewing this film through the psychoanalytic lens of trauma and dissociation enhances the impact of this film, because it lends coherence to a sense of disconnection we experience as we watch it. To be sure, this is not the only way to view the film, nor is it the only way to psychologically understand the film's characters. However, there is something about the atmosphere created by this mystifying and mysterious film that evokes the experience of trauma and isolation, a quality that also resonates throughout Murakami's fiction.

The film is not always easy to follow, perhaps in some ways like working with a patient for whom trauma and its sequelae are central to the treatment. The construction of the film's narrative contributes to this sense of fragmentation. There are gaps in time; the protagonists' behaviors do not always make sense; the ending of the film is not really an ending. People disappear suddenly, and with each additional piece of